At the meeting of the whole faculty, which now included 177 teachers, Principal Sally Aston introduced Solomon Eisenstein and Ralph Stevens, explaining what the purpose of this discussion would be. “Resolved: That Social Tech High shall be extended to the two lower grades, grades seven and eight. Mr. Eisenstein for the proposition and Mr. Stevens opposing.”
“As principal and chairwoman I have decided to give each gentleman 20 minutes for a presentation of his views. After which I will open the floor to discussion, but I will limit the topic of underage sex to the first 20 minutes before asking for a vote on whether or not to continue discussing that topic. As decided by lot, Mr. Stevens will go first. Sir?”
Once their views had been given, much as predicted, the floor was opened for discussions of underage sex. The comments made largely duplicated those made by the two speakers, so after 20 minutes of them, the assembly voted not to continue discussion of that topic.
The rest of the planned agenda included three topics: Would adding those two grades to the school be good for the students in them? Would adding those students to the school be good for those in the current four grades? Would the addition of those grades be good for the school as a whole. From the nature of the ensuing discussion, Sally felt that all three questions had the same answer. Yes.
After these topics had been covered sufficiently, the floor was opened for additional questions. Already knowing the answer, Dr. Paul Grey, Vice-Principal, asked about financing. Rita Stevens asked about residences. She shared her husband’s opposition to the proposition and wanted to know about about the dangers inherent in housing younger students.
Finally the issue was put to a vote. Teachers interested in the younger grades tended to vote in favour. Fathers of girls in the affected ages voted mostly against it. Mothers seemed undecided. As a whole, the assembly voted for the proposition, defeating the affected fathers, who would be free to send their daughters elsewhere, as some of the others had probably recognized.
The meeting continued, as questions of staffing and implementation remained to be discussed.
Sally proposed that these matters be treated in just the way the school itself had been created and run. She suggested that within those guidelines, the implementation of the project should be left up to her and a small committee chosen with new software designed for this purpose.
Sally was referring to Beth Green’s backward text matcher. Applied to the written work of school faculty members, all of whom had profiles available, the new software produced committee recommendations. It even assigned possible roles to individual members.
With only one exception, the chosen committee members agreed to serve, even accepting their suggested roles. The role left unfilled was soon filled with the use of the same software. Then a list of the committee members was circulated to faculty and staff members. Two additional faculty and one office staff member wanted to be on the committee as well. Beth’s software suggested revised roles for everyone. There were no objections. Handy piece of software, that. Sally wondered how she’d ever lived without it.
An announcement went out through all known channels, which were mostly people who had used one of the social technology software systems and had profiles available. Millions of them.
In approximately these words, it said, “Social Tech High will be expanding to include grades seven and eight, intended for students aged twelve and thirteen. Applications for students and teachers will be accepted immediately. Full scholarships will be available for those who need them. The expansion of the school will be limited by how quickly classroom space can be made available. For international students requiring residences, their acceptance will depend on how quickly residential space can be made available. If you are a qualified candidate to be a teacher or student, please apply now. If you know of such a person, please have them contact us. Finders fees may be available under certain conditions to be specified on request.”
There now. They were committed. The school would be changed forever.
Ken Green quickly mobilized an army of workers to convert space in the main school building and nearby ones. Space in the main building which had already been converted to residences would be converted again, this time to classroom space.
New residential space would be provided elsewhere. The lower floors of a different building would be converted to residential space for the younger students, while the older ones would live separately. Students would also be boarded out with families, when appropriate.
Conversion of old office, sales and warehouse space into student residences had already been happening and the teams doing the work were a bit ahead of the game. So some students in the lower grades could be housed immediately.
It would be a complicated process. The older students living in the main building would be moved into newly completed rooms elsewhere, making their old rooms available for the newcomers. Most of those rooms would be left for student use, while a small fraction would be converted into classroom space right away. When the new space for younger students was available, all of the residential space in the main building would become classrooms.
Various kinds of non-teaching staff would be required, especially people to support the students who were to get room and board directly from the school.
Beth Green referred Sally to her half-brothers Edward and Norman Green, who were not only twelve and thirteen, respectively, but were planning to become teachers themselves. Both boys went to the Green Private School, saying that they needed to be in an real educational environment in order to learn their subject.
That school had small classes and was as organized along compatibility lines as possible, given the condition which had a higher priority, its use for Green family members. It supplemented or replaced tutors for some of Ken Green’s various gifted children.
Ken had given them those gifts himself, partially through a discriminating selection of genetic material to complement his own, and partly by spending freely to hire dedicated full time tutors for the children who lived with him. Their mothers were free to take them away, but even then he supported their education handsomely.
Edward and Norman were both boys, however. A female point of view would help. There was no girl child of Ken Green’s within the key age range and planning to become a teacher. Beth recommended her half-sisters Donna and Dorothy to fill the gap.
These inseparable best friends were fifteen, outside the relevant age range, but like Edward and Norman did plan to become schoolteachers. For the same reason as the boys, they went to the Green Private School. All four children studied in the right grade for their age, on purpose, though bright enough to have advanced further.
Polled in turn, all of the kids offered the same opinion, unaware of what their half-siblings were advising. As Donna put it, “Make sure it is a school first, a community second. You will have an enormous number of applicants and can tie everyone together as you bring the students in.”
Sally asked for specifics.
“Put together a class, say a Grade Eight class. Make them a bit more compatible as a class than usual, Level Three, say. Then for each one, find the best student or teacher in the school to serve as friend or mentor. Those will also probably be Level Three connections, no more, since the school is more puddle than pool.”
“I see, Donna. The kids will still be well tied in, by more than adequate links, then the real Level Five or higher links can be added as the school expands.”
“Exactly.”
Sally decided to make an executive decision and build the class around the one true polymath in the school, the teacher who most wanted to teach younger kids.
“We want your input, Alma, but it will be mostly the software’s task. If you want the job, we will find you a class of eight kids, the best we can do for you and for the kids themselves. Probably Level Three for everybody, including you.” Sally recounted the very similar opinions she’d gotten by consulting the Greens.
“Let me at it!”
There were more than enough applicants to form a single class, which turned out to be a Grade Seven class. For now, Alma would teach them all subjects. She could do that easily.
Five of the eight spoke English as a first language, three of them being from English-speaking North America. One of the remaining three students was European, one from India, one from China. Five girls, three boys. Something in the way the software made up a compatible class had affected ages, so the boys were a few months older than the girls. And probably a few months less mature than the girls.
Only one of the students was from Manhatten. Neither of the other North American students lived anywhere within the tri-state region near New York and so seven of the new students would have to be boarded out to local families or to live in residence.
Exactly half the class had already been placed with local families for room and board. The other half would be in residence. Their rooms would be near their classrooms. An additional staff member would join the existing ones for older students, to help supervise and care for these four students. That level of extra staff would not be necessary in the future, but Sally thought it wise to start out the right way.
Alma Renwick thought it a fabulous class, the best ever. It was hard to bring the mutual compatibility of a whole class of students above Level One, since each time you add a student the requirement to be compatible with the teacher and all previous ones makes it harder. If the compatibilities of the students were independent, it would in theory take 100 million candidates to be sure of assembling a Level One class.
Since there were some predictable factors, the school managed to reach Level Two usually, but this class was almost of Level Three. Each was the best one out of a thousand for all the others, including Alma Renwick herself.
The local girl was Alice Ames. The youngest student in the class, not yet twelve, she seemed the smartest. Alice had never gone to school before. Her profile in detail had been in the computer since Alice was little, and was regularly updated, since both Sybil Ames and her daughter were Tech Fantasies volunteers. Raised with private tutors, Alice had also learned to use broom and dustpan, paint and paintbrush, working on various projects since the was barely five years old.
Alice was placed at the end of a quarter circle of students, seated beside another girl. The way seating arrangements worked, that girl would be the most likely friend for her within the class. Not nearly as close a friend as the school would eventually find for her, but someone to lean on a bit. Never having gone to school, Alice didn’t have many friends, only the few kids she had met on some Tech Fantasies volunteer work crews.
The residential students would not ever hear about it, but Alice had worked as a volunteer, helping to paint their rooms. Social Tech High was still a Tech Fantasies project and was still dependent on donors and volunteers, not investors. On weekends for some time to come Alice and her mother would work side by side on conversion projects related to the school.
Alma Renwick took at once to to the pretty girl with pale skin and slightly frizzy reddish-blonde hair. When nobody else had an answer to some question, Alice would always try to answer. She didn’t always know the correct answer, but would try, thinking out loud as necessary.
When going through the usual discussion of the number of different ways the students might be seated in a class this size, Alma always asked if simple mathematics could determine who should sit next to whom.
“So, we know about your compatibilities from your profiles. Does that mean we can calculate where to seat you?”
Nobody else had an answer, but when looked at, Alice tried to respond. “No. I mean yes, you can calculate it, I think, but only by ignoring most of the important stuff. Let me see. People are different, different in a class like this, I mean. Different from what their profiles might say. Different because of the way we react to the other kids. Um, I am the youngest one here, and shy. Imagine how insufferable I would be if I was the oldest.”
“Alice, you are not the least little bit shy.”
“Yes, Mrs. Renwick, but I might be. Try seating me between two boys. Then I’d be shy.”
“So context determines everything, Alice?”
“Pretty much, yeah, but compatibility calculations are a good starting point.”
That was Alice. Quickly the teacher’s pet.
All of the students in the class would soon be linked to much more compatible people, Level Five or above, but not as soon as had been done when the school had first been created. Then any student added had to have such strong connections. Now there were so many applications that the school was confident enough to create a few classes right away and tie them in properly later.
These classes were an experiment, an attempt to create highly compatible classes to start with, since it was so difficult to create them later. So Alice Ames began school for the first time with the people in that class as adequate friends.
To link the class even more closely to the school, each student was also advised to accept as an adequate friend someone already in the school. The population of the school was such that a Level Three connection could be certain, almost by definition. Level Three was the best choice out of 10 to the third power, the best out of 1,000 Each student in the class was now connected to the best person out of 1,487 individuals.
Alice Ames was unusually bright, even by the standards of this school, and her main interests were in computers and mathematics. So it is not just a coincidence that the person suggested to tie the young girl into the school as it had been was a brilliant mathematician who was also a brilliant computer programer.
This exceptional individual was not a student but an adult, and not someone who was at the school on a regular basis. Linked in only by a short chain of students, this woman lived in Princeton, New Jersey and was married to a linguistics professor there. Her name was Ann Kelly, Dr. Ann Kelly, with a PhD in higher mathematics from the august university in that city. She was was also the president of Technological Fantasies.
Nor was it a coincidence that young Alice actually knew the woman who would become her friend. Though living some distance away, Ann was often enough in the New York office of her organization. There she had met several of the local volunteers.
Of especial interest to Ann was the remarkable Sybil Ames, Alice’s mother, who not only worked beside her daughter, cleaning up, plastering and painting, but also donated money for Tech Fantasies projects that interested her.
Projects with a low priority to the organization as a whole might not happen for a long time unless a specific donor adopted them. Sybil had adopted several, such as rooms for some school clubs to use as their own.
Alice would indeed get closer links into the school, but for now she was very happy with her class and with the unusual video-wall link to the president of the organization the two Ames women were so dedicated to. Once the need for it was established, Sybil purchased one of these expensive communications devices for her beloved daughter to use at home.
Ann Kelly was fascinated to discover that she would have another video-wall connection to a student at Social Tech. Of course she did already have a Level Five connection to the school, but Ann sensed that the connection with Alice might be just as important.